This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology (ECST) at the California State University Los Angeles (CSULA) will renovate, reconfigure, and modernize 9,500 square feet of research space to create a Core Facility for Research in Energy and Sustainability (CEaS) to support research activities for the new NSF-supported CREST Center for Energy and Sustainability. Research in energy and sustainability is a core multi-disciplinary, multi-investigator activity within ECST, where faculty from physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, and technology collaborate. Labs will be renovated within the Engineering and Technology building on CSULA's campus. The building, constructed in 1956 and renovated in 2000, was designed as a non-research facility before CSULA's more recent focus on basic research, and therefore is inadequate to meet the needs of current faculty researchers. Through this award, five disjointed spaces will be renovated and joined into three multi-user and shared subfacilities to comprise the core energy and sustainability research facility: Environment, Materials, and Advanced Technology. The renovations will focus on expanding space for more projects and faculty and student researchers, and reconfiguring of space (e.g., research benches, fume hoods, gas lines, high voltage electrical lines, and cyberinfrastructure) needed to conduct research.
Intellectual Merit: The research that will be enhanced through this renovation address fundamental questions that have the potential to increase the availability of highly efficient, non-fossil-fuel-based energy, while promoting ideas of sustainability and stewardship. The renovated facility will support current research at CSULA in fuel cells, advanced photovoltaic materials, biofuels and combustion, and carbon sequestration. The new core research facility will enable CEaS faculty and students to conduct innovative research in a newly renovated facility that is highly conducive to multidisciplinary research.
Broader Impacts: Activities conducted in the renovated laboratories will contribute to broadening participation in science and engineering and basic research on the CSULA campus. CSULA is a comprehensive, non-Ph.D. granting university, which will leverage the new facility to involve mostly undergraduate students in research. The CEaS will be used for summer research programs, which include partner institutions (middle and high schools and community colleges) with a large population of underrepresented minority students. Summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates and Research Experiences for Teachers participants will also conduct research in this facility.
(CEaS) at California State University Los Angeles (CSULA). Funded by a National Science foundation (NSF) ARI-R2 grant and after an extensive, three-year long construction and renovation period, the CREST CEaS now boasts four modern multidisciplinary research-oriented facilities furnishing experimental and computer-based infrastructures that will enable transformative research training of predominantly underrepresented students in higher education. These previously predominantly teaching-oriented laboratories have been reconfigured and expanded into a cluster of four research-oriented laboratories. This new and improved core facility now hosts the environmental, thermo-fluids systems, advanced materials, combustion diagnostics and advanced technology sub-facilities. These state-of-the-art facilities are able to accommodate multiple multidisciplinary, teams which will be able to undertake rigorous engineering and scientific research. Led by a strong core of CEaS faculty in the areas of groundwater and carbon sequestration, smart materials, novel energy technologies, laser-based optical combustion diagnostics, and energy efficient systems, these teams will be now able to participate in long-term, large-scale, research-oriented projects that will foster their analytical and technical skills, a goal that is aligned with a primary national goal of strengthening STEM training in traditionally underrepresented minorities.
